vertebrata

Definitions

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English

n.pl. One of the grand divisions of the animal kingdom, comprising all animals that have a backbone composed of bony or cartilaginous vertebræ, together with Amphioxus in which the backbone is represented by a simple undivided notochord. The Vertebrata always have a dorsal, or neural, cavity above the notochord or backbone, and a ventral, or visceral, cavity below it. The subdivisions or classes of Vertebrata are Mammalia, Aves, Reptilia, Amphibia, Pisces, Marsipobranchia, and Leptocardia.

from The Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia

A phylum or prime division of the animal kingdom, containing all those animals which have a backbone or its equivalent; the vertebrates, formerly contrasted with all other animals (Invertebrata), now ranked as one of seven or eight phyla which are severally contrasted with one another.

Etymologies

Examples

These characteristics place man inevitably among the so-called vertebrata; he is certainly not an invertebrate, nor is the basic structure of his body such that a third group, outside the invertebrata and vertebrata, can be made to include only the single type -- man.

Most of our readers know that it belongs to that one of two primary animal divisions which is called the vertebrata, and that the distinctive feature which place it in this division is the possession of a spinal column or backbone, really a series of small ring-like bones, the vertebrae (Figure 1 v.b.) strung together, as it were, on the main nerve axis, the spinal cord (Figure 1 s.c.).

The teleology which supposes that the eye, such as we see it in man, or one of the higher vertebrata, was made with the precise structure it exhibits, for the purpose of enabling the animal which possesses it to see, has undoubtedly received its death-blow.

The _vertebrata_ are those animals which (as man and other sucklers, birds and fishes) have a backbone and a skull with lateral appendages, within which the viscera are excluded, and to which the muscles are attached.

Along with these in the slate system are a few lowly genera of crustacea, and of a higher class, the mollusca, and the existence of these imply the contemporary existence of certain humbler forms of life, vegetable and animal, for their subsistence, forming a scene approaching to what is found in seas of the present day, excepting that fishes, nor any higher vertebrata, as yet roamed the marine wilds.